Quotes
Quotes - Shelley
Then black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the world in which I moved alone.
With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us.
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow.
A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Kings are like stars,--they rise and set, they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set;
While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon,
The cross leads generations on.
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
What! alive, and so bold, O earth?
All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
. . . . . .
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.
Those who inflict must suffer, for they see
The work of their own hearts, and this must be
Our chastisement or recompense.
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear.
Peter was dull; he was at first
Dull,--oh so dull, so very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed,
Still with this dulness was he cursed!
Dull,--beyond all conception, dull.
A lovely lady, garmented in light
From her own beauty.
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
I love tranquil solitude
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good.
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
You lie--under a mistake,
For this is the most civil sort of lie
That can be given to a man's face. I now
Say what I think.
